


Down the Rabbit Hole

by Narkito



Category: Sherlock (TV)
Genre: Drugs, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-04-03
Updated: 2011-04-03
Packaged: 2017-10-17 13:46:37
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,726
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/177477
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Narkito/pseuds/Narkito
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>What were Sherlock's poisons of choice? A study on Sherlock's experience with drugs.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Down the Rabbit Hole

**Author's Note:**

> This was written in response to a prompt in the [**sherlockbbc_fic**](http://sherlockbbc-fic.livejournal.com/) kink meme, which can be found [here](http://sherlockbbc-fic.livejournal.com/6487.html?thread=34202711#t34202711).

__  
**Benzoes**   
  


The first psychoactive to enter his system comes from his mother’s purse. She should fill a prescription every few months, but she’s careless and lets two or three pills run down the drain once a week at the very least. Others are crushed under her heels when they fall to the ground, and a few more are forever lost in the vastness of her purse. In reality she fills a prescription every month. So, stealing a handful over the course of a couple of weeks it’s fairly easy. Clonazepam is hardly the first psychoactive he has ever tried, though, if you take into account more day-to-day drugs such as coffee, tobacco and booze (which he has plenty experience with), he’s already got a head start over his classmates.

He locks himself in his room and observes one of the little white tablets. It looks infinitely harmless and inconspicuous in his hand; its round form and a dusty white colour screaming “dull” at every direction; a paradox of sorts. It has the name of the laboratory that produces them on the back, and a small indent to help you break it in half on the front. He picks it up and puts it in his mouth, it starts to dissolve almost immediately, but he already has a glass of water waiting for him on the night table. His plan is to make the most of his 4 hours of unsupervised time, and take them one by one and see what happens. He’s got a grand total of 10 pills. He’s taking no more than 5 and keeping the rest for research purposes. He downs the first pill with a big gulp of water and slumps in his bed to wait for the 0.5 milligrams of clonazepam to kick in.

After 20 minutes of mindless waiting, assessing his body and cognitive state now and then, he gets the distinct feeling that it’s all _fine_. Like when you oversleep on a Sunday and the sun’s just streaming in and there’s a cold breeze passing just over your head which stirs you to wakefulness in the gentlest way possible. What could go wrong on a Sunday morning like this? Another 10 minutes go by and the feeling keeps growing little by little making him feel lighter than ever. He pops two more pills and swallows them with the help of the remaining water. Screw research, these pills are good!

****  
_BZDs and Dad’s Stash_   


His own father keeps a liquor cabinet to die for (and that probably costs more than some people’s tuition fees), but he knows with absolute certainty that digging into father’s supply is a bad idea. If father doesn’t get him, then Mycroft surely will. So instead he gets invited to his classmate’s house and takes the remaining of his clonazepam with him. He downs 5 pills with his drink, a noble attempt at a vodka and orange (more like a vodka and vodka on the rocks). He doesn’t dwell much on what he’s doing, he’s just looking for a new kind of buzz.

As soon as he swallows he hands over the rest of his stash. It had been his entry ticket and by now consists of 15 round little white pills. He puts them in a big-sized ashtray on the coffee table, with the rest of them (other people’s contributions) and goes sit to the nearest chair, waiting for the alcohol and pills to do their magic.

Twenty-odd minutes later, he’s tripping and absorbing the surroundings under a new light. His heart slowed down to a distant _thud_ every now and then, and his hands just itching to touch the rug. It doesn’t feel so much like the first time he took benzoes, but it gets close enough. What happens next takes him by surprise. As distance and time start to distort into and onto themselves, there’s a loud screech coming from the kitchen that all but slices his brain open. He doesn’t understand what’s happening, and barely manages to get out of the couch he had claimed for himself. Before he knows it, there’s people going in and out of the kitchen and there’s talk about calling an ambulance. The fear of getting caught surpasses the duty to help. So he bolts. And so do most of his classmates.

Trying to cross the street proves to be quite the challenge when you don’t really know how far away the pavement is, or exactly how fast those cars are coming, but he manages to get home without falling once. It takes him twice as usual, though, and by the time he gets there his buzz is almost gone and his mother is waiting for him in the sitting room. The police had called. Steve Price had overdosed in Allan Laurie’s kitchen. Allan Laurie’s being the name he had provided when asked where he would be spending his afternoon. His mother takes one look at him and knows exactly what happened. She doesn’t say anything else. He doesn’t either. And it’s in a sort of mutual (silent) agreement that he goes to his room. The disgust in his mother’s face stings right through the remainder of his tranquilizer high, and he wishes he hadn’t left those other 15 pills sitting in the ashtray.

  
****  
_Opioids: Take One_   


After a nasty injury to the knee and the subsequent surgery; the doctor, very reluctantly, prescribes him with Tramacet, the perfect mixture of tramadol hydrochloride and paracetamol. The latter kicks in first, elevating the pain threshold and making it harder for his brain to register the pain. The former, the really fun one, kicks in ten-something minutes later and makes you feel like everything is right with the world. Not fine, just plain right. His knee may hurt (he actually feels the pain underneath it all), but he doesn’t really care anymore.

He hadn’t felt like this since the first time he solved a mystery (and someone actually listened). So good, so light, so perfect. The graphics of the real world seemed to have faded a bit around the edges and brightened a tad too much in just the exact places, like a contrast-blur-sharpen combo bar had been activated somewhere inside his brain, and everything had just went to the beautiful end of the spectrum. Too bad the box only came with 10 pills, because he had gone through them all within the first 36 hours. Now, he needed more.

  
****  
_Weed_   


His flatmate at uni smokes the stuff almost every day. One boring day, Sherlock finally accepts the usual offering of the goods and takes the plunge. He spends the next two hours fixated on the coffee table. Its wooden legs and surfaces exercising a magnetic pull on his mind; so strong and thorough, he can barely manage a thought at a time, and somehow he convinces himself this is the work of magic.

After the electromagnetic field of the coffee table subdues, he curses himself for letting himself be seduced by something so bane and dull, and so, he swears to never touch the stuff again. He also gets rid of the wooden _thing_ the very next day.

  
****  
_Opioids: Take Two_   


Sherlock gets headaches, really bad headaches. He goes through the usual channels and scanners, only to find out his Circle of Willis incomplete, lacking posterior communicating arteries (earning him a big chuckle from the doctor), and nothing else wrong with his brain. No tumours, no pathologic malformations, no clots, no abscesses. Even the lack of arteries isn’t fatal (nor headache-inducing), just a variation of the brain (almost 14% of the population has it).

The doctor puts him under several medical regimens trying to find a cure for his headaches, and also waltz him through several specialists trying to make him healthier. The optometrist to make sure he doesn’t need glasses (he does, but he likes to think that he doesn’t), the nutritionist to check his weight (under weight, as always, but apparently in good health despite that) and the dermatologist to check for a suspicious looking mole (innocuous).

After trying with beta-blockers, gabapentin and flunarizine, the doctor prescribes Sherlock with Tramacet to manage the pain. “It’s SOS only”, the doctor says, and Sherlock immediately redefines his conception of SOS. After going through four refills in less than a week, he decides it’s time to get the stuff elsewhere, before people start asking questions. He also decides he’s far too fond of his liver and kidneys, so he gets tramadol alone, no toxic paracetamol associated with it to screw with his system. The first dose hits him like a freight train and he floats on a daze feeling better than ever for almost an hour. In between doses and refills, he tries to figure out how to score more of the beautiful stuff without having to sell his soul.

  
****  
_Opiates, Much Better than Opioids_   


After getting the daylights beaten out of him. He has to go under the knife to repair his knee (same knee as before). This time, due to the gravity of his injuries, and the ear shattering cries he’s giving, they bring out the good stuff to make the pain go away. In a way he’s glad he almost died on that alley. Every cell of his body is vibrating to the tune of morphine right now.

 _Forget opioids, opiates are the real thing_ , he tells a nurse that’s checking on his vitals. She smiles and tells him to enjoy the ride. He has vague memories of reading a note on the internet about wallabies eating opium poppies and getting so high on it, they couldn’t hop on a straight line anymore, so they went about in circles, eating more poppies and thus creating crop circles on the poppy fields, and costing quite a good chunk of money to the farmers. He wonders if he could hop in circles if it wasn’t for his bad leg. Maybe he should try anyways, and then get high again, under different, better circumstances and compare the experiences. But his body is heavy, like he’s anchored to the bed; and it’s just too damn pleasant to let go of that feeling to do something as stupid as getting out of bed.

The pain is already subsiding, and his mind slipping further away from him. The less pain he has, the higher he gets. A few more minutes and he’ll be an astronaut. They should’ve never giving him control over his own morphine intake; of course he pushed more than half a vial into his blood stream before anyone could stop him. He may look like a responsible adult, but he’s most certainly not one of those. Far from it actually. Not that it really matters anymore, as he feels like he’s wrapped in cotton and getting massages on every inch of his body. There’s just the hint of dizziness and nausea on the back of his mind, but he’s more than capable of tucking it away to the far corners of his consciousness. His arm will fall asleep any minute now, under the full weight of his body, but he couldn’t care less about it. It’s just part of this beautiful entanglement called life. That’s exactly how heavy and fuzzy-warm his entire being is. He’s just too high to even bother to move an extremity. And he’s loving it.

There’s a spider on the ceiling and it looks like it’s finally done with its web, he feels a swell of pride for the spider and calls it a night. It’s not like he can actually get some sleep whilst being on morphine, but turning off his brain more than makes up for it. With interests.

They send him home with oxycodone for the pain and it feels like Christmas all over again.

  
****  
_LSD_   


He was unaware he was taking it. If anything the giggles of other people should’ve been a clue, but he was already half drunk and too slow to notice much of anything. He was too busy trying to keep himself alive whilst yet another one of his insufferable lows took hold of his life. It wasn’t completely his fault that he was so sluggish that night. By the time he had figured out _why_ they were laughing, it was too late to do anything about it; leaving him no other option than ride it out and somehow make it through his own version of Sherlock in Wonderland.

His brain frazzles and all the data starts to mix into a big pile of confusion. It’s a constant rush of _too much_ , and just not enough time to process it. His hands no longer feel like his own. His forehead feels hot. The rest of his face has gone numb. He can hear them laughing and their laughs start to make long winding lines in the space between him and _them_. If he doesn’t back against the wall, the lines will touch him, and he doesn’t want that. They’re laughing harder by now, and he isn’t completely gone yet, so he can hear them say how much the _freak_ had it coming. He takes his bag and scarf and leaves the bar in search of a quiet place. He manages to get a couple of minutes of peace on his way to his flat, when the world tips on its axe and everything goes sideways. The world, from that point of view, was obliterated. Thankfully, Victor finds him a good ten minutes later and walks him to his own flat.

By the time he’s done tripping most of Victor’s plates and cups are littered on the floor, and he wants nothing more to do with LSD and those so called friends. In fact, for the first time in weeks, he’s glad he’s finally graduating from this dump anyway. Then, Victor informs him he’s called his brother and that he’s on his way. And the world tips on its axe again; except gentler and less frightening than the night before. _I had to_ , Victor informs him, and what can he possibly say when he knows there’s no sense in dwelling on the past? Victor also informs him of his activities from last night, and Sherlock is all of the sudden acutely aware of his half-nakedness and the general mess of the flat. Mycroft’s going to have a feast with this one. For the entire next minute he feels rather helpless and wishes there was some sense in dwelling on the past, as not to do an exercise in futility and waste his precious time.

  
****  
_Cokehead_   


His lows have never been lower before. He needs, he _craves_ the rush, the adrenaline; but he can’t find it anywhere. He’s broke. No, not exactly. He has a place to live, food on the table and expensive clothes in his bedroom. He also has a limited supply of cigarettes. What he doesn’t have, is pocket money.

After finishing his studies and thus satisfying his mother’s wishes, he tries to make it into the world and finds himself unemployed and unemployable. Not that he wanted a job to begin with, but he needs to pay the bills, and his rather destructive hobbies and habits. In the end, Mycroft ends up taking care of him in the most unobtrusive way possible, which amounts to having everything taken care of, except pocket money. He won’t starve or freeze to death; it’s true all of his basic needs are covered, but he’s _bored_ , he has a full agenda of nothing to do, and it’s driving him up the walls.

It’s dark and freezing outside (twelve past ten pm) and he’s decided he’s going to score _something_ at all costs. In the end it’s much simpler than that; he ends up trading some of his worldly possessions in exchange for his mainly preferred diversion: morphine, and also taking home a sample bag of cocaine. They said it was freshly arrived from Eastern Europe, and how can he say no? Morphine might give a rather pleasant buzz, but it won’t do the trick with his lows anymore. Ergo, coke.

He goes home and observes his newly acquired substance; the fine white powder inside the small plastic bag ultimately leaves him feeling great, grand, exceptional and unreservedly satisfied with himself. Six months later he’s going through several packets a week and conjuring all sorts of magic acts to get the money that’ll keep him in the happiness business. He’s also been working more on things that actually matter to him. Four months after that, he’s switched to injections due to non-stop nosebleeds, and even though he still gets them from time to time, the new delivery system proves to be much more satisfactory. He’s also no longer Mycroft’s little pet. A onetime incursion into the world of drug-dealers and meth, leaves him with enough money to sustain himself and his habits long enough to make his detective errands a more permanent job. He’s quite satisfied by that.

  
****  
_Heroin_   


By this time he knows better than go screwing around with his respiratory system. So he shoots it up.

It reaches the brain in fifteen to thirty seconds. And all that comes after is pure bliss. When he cooks it, it turns into a brownish slush, and a part of him tries to tell him it’s a very bad idea to let that reach his brain, but he doesn’t listen. By now, he’s also learnt not to listen to that part of his mind.

Once it takes hold of him, all the pain and worries go away. There’s no hunger, there’s no anxiety. He finally feels safe. He never thought he would say this, but it feels like being wrapped around a warm fuzzy blanket and being stroked in a loving way. In his state he could almost swear this is god’s way of reaching out to him. If there was a god, he’s certain this is what it would feel like to touch him.

After a while, the part of his mind that hates the brownish/pinkish colour of the stuff, convinces him to get medical-grade diamorphine, so, one very good day, he manages to get his hands on a shipment to the Netherlands and, after coughing up an obscene amount of money, he is now in possession of top-shelf heroin. It’s nothing like the one he can get on the streets; this one is clear as day and it hits him in the most wonderful way possible. His eyes flutter shut and everything is bright and beautiful. The world is just perfect they way it is, so he smiles. He’s on the couch, still on his pyjamas from last night and he can barely move. The rush of endorphins making him euphoric in a rather silent fashion. There’s a knock on the door, but he doesn’t care. He only has ten more minutes of pure bliss before landing on the nod.

After the initial rush, his dreamy and relaxed state barely allows outer noises to come in, and as such, he doesn’t notice that someone is knocking on the door again, at the same time his mobile vibrates on the coffee table, just in front of him. He’s dreaming about his childhood and the time they went to abroad to a beach, he can’t really remember why, or where. But the whole family was there and he was happy. They went horse riding, and then to a restaurant. His hair crisp and sticky from the combination of sand, sun and water. His mother affectionately looking at them both; he and Mycroft. He has never seen her so relaxed. Her hair is down and her lipstick is a beautiful shade of red. Father is telling a story and they’re all laughing. He wishes things could always remain like this.

_“Sherlock!”_

After having lunch they go back to the hotel, to rest before going out for the evening and the rest of the night. They’re invited to a party. All of them! Sherlock is excited and pestering Mycroft, and for once, Mycroft is not being all snotty about it. They’re discussing what to wear and mother laughs in the hallway, after hearing what they’re saying.

_“SHERLOCK!”_

There are other children his age at the party. And he’s both thankful and frightened by that. He’s hardly ever had a friendship that ended well with people his age. He likes to hang out with Mycroft a whole lot more, or Father’s friends. But it’s summer, not only that, it’s a summer _abroad_. Tomorrow none of these kids will remember him much and he’ll be just another face from the past summer. Mycroft has already gone to talk to some girls, trying to impress them with his massive intellect, and Sherlock is a bit disgusted by that.

He looks at the other end of the yard and a face strikes him as familiar, he remembers that nose and those eyes, but from where?

_“Sherlock, god dammit! Wake up!”_

He’s shaken out of his reverie by a passing waiter and the face blurs with everybody else’s faces. A kid, approximately his age, but a bit shorter than him, approaches him with a big smile.

“Hi, I’m Greg, who are you?”

 _Greg_ , he thinks, _didn’t he know a Greg from before?_

 _”Sherlock, what did you take?”_ Lestrade shakes him forcefully and pinches his ear between his index and thumb, driving a nail to it.

Sherlock’s vision comes to focus to come face to face with the same kid as before, only fully grown out, a deep line of worry cutting through his forehead.

“Lestrade, I dreamt about you”, he slurs “we were in France, I think...”. His eyes flutter shut again and Lestrade pinches his ear again, at the same time he fishes through his trouser’s pockets in search for his phone.

An emergency call, an ambulance ride and one healthy dose of naloxone later, Sherlock is slowly recovering from heroin overdose on a hospital bed and feeling miserable at it, as Lestrade observes from a plastic chair by his bead side. His arms folded over his chest, face grim, feet firmly planted on the floor. And a folder tucked under his left arm.

“Got a case?”

“Got a brain?”

“A _yes_ or _no_ answer will suffice.”

“Same here.”

“Then yes.”

“OK then, murder-suicide down at Soho...”

**Author's Note:**

> I imported this from my journal, so if you notice any typos or weird errors, please point them to me. Also, this hasn't been brit-picked or anything, so again, any glaring mistakes, please do let me know. Other than that, really hope you enjoyed the story :)


End file.
